


karma

by eleven_eleven



Series: Another 365 thing that I obviously have no discipline to finish [3]
Category: A3! (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, God and Worshipper AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-22 18:22:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21306503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleven_eleven/pseuds/eleven_eleven
Summary: 72ᴺᴰ wordThe boy sings of love.
Relationships: Tachibana Izumi/Usui Masumi
Series: Another 365 thing that I obviously have no discipline to finish [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1536095
Comments: 15
Kudos: 119





	karma

The boy sings of love, but Izumi knows that it is merely infatuation.

His immediate attachment comes easily and will go easily, so Izumi does not let herself fall. Afterall, who prays to a god with a battered shrine? Her temple is ragged and offerings non-existent. One cannot read what nature she governs without two weeks of scrubbing the built-up grime. Izumi has resigned to a fate of being erased by time. The hapless arrival of a boy shouldn’t have given herself hope as it should.

The boy sings of love, but Izumi shuts her ears. She escapes to an inside room when she hears the clamor of a broom. Three days after the re-discovery of her shrine, the boy goes to quick work. On the fourth day he brings a rake, the fifth—a mop and rags. He realizes that water has long since dried at the well and so he brings a pail every day.

If the well be once refilled, only the trees know the answer.

The sixth day comes and there’s a flower at the base of her statue. It had ruffled petals rimmed with pink. The boy stays at the temple for the night. An offering of carnation for a temporary place to stay.

By the seventh day, Izumi settles on a tree to the right. She plays with the carnation. Tempted as she might be to pluck the petals for a juvenile game of “he comes back, he comes back not,” she preserves the flower, if only a reminder that someone stayed for a while. A memory before disappearing to the void. She doesn’t feel the raindrops plop.

The canopy provides ample protection from the rain. She sees the boy arrive at the bottom of the stairs dripping wet, and if the branches extend a little further to offer shelter from the upcoming storm, Izumi claims to be unaware. The boy has brought a hammer and nails. Once she has seen the boy arrive safely at the top, Izumi hops inside. She senses a distinct pair of eyes looking at her.

She looks back to see the boy scrubbing the stone steps to the temple.

The boy sings of love, and Izumi wonders when will he be exhausted. The boy has been visiting for two weeks now, which is three days further than Izumi expected. She had once believed that he would last a week and a half at most, but by now he has swept the grounds and painted a second coat on the front wall. Izumi decides that an estimate of two months maximum would be more apt, so that she won’t be proven wrong the second time.

On the third Sunday, the boy doesn’t bring items for repair. He has brought all cleaning materials on the first week. Today, at the bottom of the stairs, Izumi sees the boy cradle a bouquet. The same pink-rimmed ruffles. He lays it on the feet of her image. He proceeds to a side room shortly thereafter.

The boy finishes cleaning up after a month. The temple was awfully small, but it was torn by a war called time. By the time the boy has finished, he has replaced nearly every plank and door in Izumi’s home. Her statue remains untouched. Though the full set of powers have not returned, she is reinvigorated by the fresh surroundings. Maybe she can dissipate in peace.

The boy sings of love, and Izumi wonders how his throat does not get parched. The odes must have been turned bland after five weeks of constant replay. As a god, Izumi feels pity. She spreads cammelias on the side of the temple. When the boy sees the little garden, his eyes are gentle.

Izumi feels her heart twitch; she steps down from her tree, step as soft as the boy’s expression, and she looks in wonder. She looks back at the flowers, contemplative.

She doesn’t feel the object of the boy’s gaze switch.

The boy has been singing of love for a year now. Izumi has resigned herself to his regular visits. He brings a bouquet every first week, and Izumi wonders if it’s just her imagination that the ruffles of the more recent flowers have darker and redder rims. The boy turned the side room to a humble abode, a singular mat at the corner and the littlest desk.

On days that the boy arrives late, Izumi likes to take short naps on his bed. On days the boy stays late, Izumi likes to rest against the walls opposite. She studies his face and maps constellations. She may also be guilty of poking the beauty mark on his cheek. It’s fine. The boy isn’t awake anyway, and he would not be able to sense her. Her inspection of him would only be for the wind to remember.

It is a year and a half later when someone other than the boy arrives. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and he grips his coat too tightly. He perseveres through the stairs and leaves Izumi unnerved. Since the boy has been visiting, she should’ve realized that the location of her temple is still accessible. And yet, with a year of seeing only him, she has forgotten that there are other humans that exist.

The strange visitor takes a call. “Yeah, I’m here. It’s creepy. I think it’s a house of some sort? I don’t know who lives this deep in the woods. Hang on, I’ll try to knock. But don’t drop the line.”

The strange visitor knocks, and no one answers, because nobody is home. And it is true. Izumi has no body of her own. She is but a figment of imagination; a deity created through the sheer will of people desperate for a miracle. There was a myth that humans cannot find magic anywhere for the magic is inside their very own selves. Izumi, an observer of humanity, knows this for a fact.

“I don’t think there’s anyone inside.”

The strange visitor enters and Izumi remains concerned. He checks the lounge and Izumi trails after him, analyzing his expressions. His voice. The boy never talked in the span of their one-year acquaintance. Hearing another sound beside birdsong is bizarre.

“This is where his girlfriend lives?”

Outside once again, the strange visitor nearly steps on a budding camellia. The poor child was terrified. She eases it out of the way with a beckon. Let the strange visitor inspect her sanctuary, but another offense and he will be given a subtle reminder to go his own way.

“What? No. You’re asking me… It looks like a temple. Well-maintained. Mhm. There’s a side-room with a mattress, I think that’s where he’s sleeping. I don’t know either, Sakuya.”

The strange visitor walks inside once again. This time, he arrives at the foot of her statue. He looks at her image in scrutiny.

“Yeah, scratch that ‘well-maintained’. I don’t know what the hell is _this_ doing here.”

The strange visitor tries to scrub the dirt on her plaque. Izumi knows it’s futile.

“I don’t know what the hell this is. I’ll call you later when I find out. I need both hands. Bye.”

The cleaning supplies are on the far-left corner, and Izumi hopes the strange visitor does not know where to find it. She has long given up on participating in life’s cycle. It would do her well if the statue deteriorates beyond relief.

She would make him stop his efforts of restoration, but the clatter of the trees by the windows would be barely heard, much less distract the fellow.

And yet, the fellow was distracted due to a clatter that Izumi is decidedly not the cause of.

There the boy was, gripping the partition, fuming. He’s slightly out of breath. He glares for a silent few seconds before whispering, “What the hell are you doing, Tsuzuru.”

“Masumi! Give a guy a warning, won’t you?” Strange Visitor Tsuzuru has worked up on half the plaque already, showing the characters 「IZU」 and 「DEITY OF SPR」.

Oh.

The boy is called Masumi.

“I’m asking you what the hell are you doing here. Tsuzuru.”

“We’re worried!” Tsuzuru blurts out. Masumi’s glare presses on. Tsuzuru grips tight on the rags, perplexed. “You used to disappear for hours and that was already bad, but now we see you gone for weeks. You won’t even tell us the slightest information about this girlfriend of yours; then we discover that you go to temples on backwards end of nowhere?”

Masumi steps towards her statue, careful, as if afraid of injuring a bluebird. “It’s none of your concern. Now hurry up and get out of this room.”

“You’re not answering the question.”

“I said get out, Tsuzuru.”

“Your mother is concerned!”

“Get. Out.”

“Is that it? Are you praying to a godless shrine? For _what_?”

“I said, _get the fuck out_, Tsuzuru!”

Tsuzuru’s mouth shuts with an audible click.

“Christ.” Tsuzuru mutters. “Buddha. Heaven Almighty. What is wrong with you, Masumi?”

“What’s wrong is you in this room when I’ve told you fuck many times to get out. Do I need to haul you towards the front door?”

Tsuzuru holds up his hands in surrender. “Calm down. I’m asking because we’re worried about you, Masumi. It’s bad enough that nobody sees you outside classes, now you’re even actively skipping them. Your parents tasked me to take care of you—and trust me, they do care—but you’re making it extremely hard when you disappear every single day.”

Masumi says nothing.

“I allowed it for a year. Thought it’d get better. Now, you just need intervention.”

Izumi gobbles up the conversation with the fervor of a parched man in a desert. Maybe it was curiosity about Masumi’s origins. Maybe it’s because it’s the first speckle of human interaction for a long while. Maybe, it was because this is the first time she has seen Masumi so, so _angry_.

“Your intervention is to stalk me. Have you no sense of privacy?”

“I asked you dozens of times. You never gave me a straight answer.”

Masumi turns to stare at the ground. His breathing evens out until Izumi barely hears anything. Before Izumi had half the mind to peek at his expression, he looks up once again, face carefully blank.

“Alright. I understand. Let’s talk about this back at the house.”

Tsuzuru breathes a sigh of relief. He thought he would need to convince Masumi more; he had a speech and laundry list of reasons prepared. The outburst was unexpected, but it was a transient reaction to his rather straightforward approach of cornering Masumi exactly where he considers private. The indignance was understandable.

Izumi sits at the foot of the moss-covered stone, alone, left with a puzzle of a dialogue she doesn’t have enough pieces to complete. The branches, instead of clattering, batter the windows for the whole night— yet no one was there to hear.

Masumi arrives the next day with a lock and a key.


End file.
